Oxham smiled. It was a pleasant enough story. Possibly containing some truth, or perhaps a strange outgrowth of a man's guilt, who had tortured so many of the creatures to death sixteen centuries ago.

"Have you seen the statues, Senator?"

"Statues, m'lord?"

A subvocalized command trembled upon the sovereign's jaw, and the faceted sky grew dark. The air chilled, and forms appeared around them. Of course, Oxham thought, the high canopy of diamond was not only for decoration; it housed a dense lattice of synesthesia projectors. The garden was, in fact, one vast airscreen.

Senator and Emperor were in a great stone space now. A few shafts of sunlight illuminated a suspension of particulate matter: dust from the rolling hills of grain that surrounded them. In this dim ambience the statues, which were carved from some smooth, jet stone, glistened, their skins as reflective as black oil. They sat upright in housecat fashion, forepaws tucked neatly together and tails curled. Their angular faces were utterly serene, their posture informed by the geometries of some simple, primordial mathematics. They were clearly gods; early and basic totems of protection. "These were the saviors of civilization," he said. "You can see it in their eyes."

To Senator Oxham, the eyes seemed blank, featureless black orbs into which one could write one's own madness.

The Emperor raised a finger, another signal.

Some of the motes of grainy dust grew, gaining substance and structure, flickering alight now with their own fire. They began to move, swirling into a shape that was somehow familiar to Oxham. The constellation of bright flairs formed a great wheel, slowly rotating around senator and sovereign. After a moment, Oxham recognized the shape. She had seen it all her life, on airscreen displays, in jeweled pendants, and in two-dimensional representations from the senatorial flag to the Imperial coat of arms. But she had never been inside the shape before--or rather, she had always been inside it: these were the thirty-four stars of the Eighty Worlds.

"This is our new excess grain, Senator. The material wealth and population of almost fifty solar systems, the technologies to bend these resources to our will, and infinitely long lives, time enough to discover the new philosophies that will be humanity's next astronomy, mathematics, and written language. But again this bounty is threatened from without."

Nara Oxham regarded the Emperor in the darkness. Suddenly, his obsessions did not seem so harmless.

"The Rix, Your Majesty?"

"These Rix, these vermin-worshiping Rix," he hissed. "Compelled by an insane religion to infect all humanity with their compound minds. It's the Law of the Parasite again: our wealth, our vast reserves of energy and information summon forth a host of vermin from out of the desert, who seek to drain our civilization before it can reach its true promise."

Even through the dulling effects of the apathy bracelet, Oxham felt the passion in the Emperor, the waves of paranoia that wracked his powerful mind. Despite herself, she'd been caught off-guard, so circuitously had he arrived at his point.

"Sire," Oxham said carefully, wondering how far the privilege of her office would really protect her in the face of the man's mania. "I was not aware that the compound mind phenomenon was so destructive. Host worlds don't suffer materially. In fact, some report greater efficiency in communications flow, easier maintainence of water systems, smoother air traffic."

The Emperor shook his head.

"But what is lost? The random collisions of data that inform a compound mind are human culture itself. That chaos isn't some peripheral by-product, it is the essence of humanity. We can't know what evolutionary shifts will never take place if we become mere vessels for this mutant software the Rix dare to call a mind."

Oxham almost pointed out the obvious, that the Emperor was voicing the same arguments against the Rix that the Secularists made against his own immortal rule: Living gods were never beneficial for human society. But she controlled herself. Even through apathy she could taste the man's conviction, the strange fixity of his thinking, and knew it was pointless to bring this subtle point to his attention now. The Rix and their compound minds were this Emperor's personal nightmare. She took a less argumentative tack.

"Sire, the Secular Party has never questioned your policy on blocking compound minds from propagating. And we stood firm in the unity government during the Rix Incursion. But the spinward frontier has been quiet for almost a century, has it not?" "It has been a secret, though no doubt you have heard rumors the last decade or so. But the Rix have been moving against us once again."

The Emperor stood and pointed into the darkness, and the wheeling cluster of stars halted, then began to slide, the spinward reaches coming toward him. One of the stars came to rest at his extended fingertip.

"This, Senator, is Legis XV. Some five hours ago, the Rix attacked here with a small but determined force. A suicide mission. Their objective was to take our sister the Child Empress, and to hold her hostage while they propagated a compound mind upon the planet."

For a few moments, Oxham's mind was overwhelmed. War, was all that she could think. The Child Empress in alien hands. If harm came to her, the grays would reap a huge political windfall, the rush to armed conflict would become unstoppable.

"Then, m'lord, that is the cause of the Loyalists' move toward a war economy," she finally managed.

"Yes. We cannot assume that this is an isolated attack."

Her empathy caught a flicker of disturbance from the Emperor.

"Is your sister all right, Sire?"

"A frigate is standing by, ready to attempt a rescue," the Emperor said. "The captain has already launched a rescue mission. We should learn the results in the next hour."

He stroked the cat. She felt resignation in him, and wondered if he already knew the outcome of the rescue attempt, and was withholding the information.

Then Oxham realized that her party was in peril. She had to withdraw the legislation before news of the Rix raid broke. Once this outrage was made public, her counterthrust to the grays would seem traitorous. The Emperor had done her and the Secular Party a favor with this warning.

"Thank you, sire, for telling me this."

He put one hand on her shoulder. Even through her thick senatorial gown, she could feel the cool of his hand, the deadness of it. "This is not the time to work against each other, Senator. You must understand, we have no quarrel with your party. The dead and the living need one another, in peace and in war. The future we seek is not a cold place."

"Of course not, sire. I will withdraw the legislation at once."

After she had said the words, Oxham realized that the Emperor hadn't even asked her. That was true power, she supposed, one's desires met without the need to give orders.

"Thank you, Nara," he said, the fierce mania that had shaped his mind a few moments before sliding from her awareness, as he returned to his former imperious calm. "We have great hopes for you, Senator Oxham. We know that your party will stand by us in this battle against the Rix."

"Yes, sire." There was really nothing else she could say.

"And we hope that you will support us in dealing with the compound mind, which may well have succeeded in taking hold on Legis XV."

She wondered exactly what the sovereign meant by that. But he continued before she could ask.

"We should like to appoint you to a war council, Senator," he said.

Oxham could only blink. The Emperor squeezed her shoulder and let his arm drop, turned half away. She realized that no acceptance was necessary. If another Rix incursion were underway, a war council would have tremendous power granted to it by the Senate. She would sit in chambers with the mightiest humans in the Eighty Worlds. Nara Oxham would be among their number in privilege, in access to information, in ability to make history. In sheer power.

"Thank you, m'lord," was all that she could say.

He nodded slightly, his eyes focused on the white belly of the calico. The beast arched its back languorously, until the ridge of the symbiant almost formed an omega on the warm red stone.

War.

Ships hurtling toward each other in the compressed time of relativistic velocities, their crews fading from the memory of family and friends, lives ending in seconds-long battles whose tremendous energies unleashed brief new suns. Deadly raids on opposing populations, hundreds of thousands killed in minutes, continents poisoned for centuries. Peaceful research and education suspended as whole planetary economies were consumed by war's hunger for machines and soldiers. Generations of human history squandered before both sides, wounded and exhausted, played for stalemate. And, of course, the real possibility--the high probability--that her new lover would be dead before it all was over.

Suddenly, Oxham was appalled at herself, her ambition, her lust for power, the thrill she had felt upon being asked to help prosecute this war. She felt it still there inside her: the resonant pleasure of status gained, new heights of power scaled.

"My lord, I'm not sure--"

"The council shall convene in four hours," the Emperor interrupted. Perhaps he had anticipated her doubts, and didn't want to hear them. Her reflexive politesse asserted itself, calming the maelstrom of conflicting motivations. Say nothing until you are sure, she ordered herself. She forced calm into her veins, focusing on the slow, synesthetic wheel of eighty worlds that orbited herself and the sovereign.

The Emperor continued, "By then, we shall have heard from the Lynx. We'll know what's happened out on Legis XV."

Her gaze was caught and held by a red star out on the periphery of the Empire. Darkness gathered in the corner of her eyes, as if she were close to blacking out. She must have misheard.

"The Lynx, sire?"

"The Navy vessel stationed over Legis XV. They should attempt a rescue soon."

"The Lynx," she echoed. "A frigate, m'lord?"

The Emperor looked at her with, for the first time noting her expression. "Yes, exactly."

Oxham realized that he had misinterpreted her knowledge as some sort of military expertise. She controlled herself again, and continued. "A stroke of luck, sire, having such a distinguished commander on the scene."

"Ah, yes," the Emperor sighed. "Laurent Zai, the hero of Dhantu. It would be a pity to lose him. But an inspiration, perhaps."

"But you said the Rix force was small, m'lord. Surely in a hostage rescue, the captain himself wouldn't..."

"To lose him to an Error of Blood, I meant. Should he fail."

The Emperor moved to stand, and Oxham rose on uncertain legs. The garden lightened again, obliterating the false hills of grain, the godlike feline statues, the Eighty Worlds. The faceted sky overhead seemed for a moment fragile, a ludicrous folly, a house of glass cards ready to be toppled by a breath.

As preposterous and shattery as love, she thought. "I must prepare for war, Senator Oxham."

"I leave you, Your Majesty," she managed.

Nara Oxham wound her way out of the garden, blind to its distractions, blending the Emperor's words into one echoing thought:

To lose him, should he fail.

EXECUTIVE OFFICER

Katherie Hobbes paused to gather herself before entering the observation blister. Her report was essential to the captain's survival. This was no time to be overwhelmed by childhood fears.

She remembered her gravity training on the academy orbital Phoenix. The orbital, stationed low over Home, was reoriented every day at random. Through the transparent outer ceilings and floors, the planet might be hanging overhead, looming vertiginously below, or tilted at any imaginable angle. The orbital's artificial gravity, already compromised by the proximity of Home, was likewise reconfigured throughout the academy on an hourly basis. The routes between stations (which had to be traversed quickly in the short intervals between classes) might require a dozen changes in orientation; the gravity direction of each corridor shifted without pattern. Only a few hasty markings sprayed onto the rollbars showed what was coming when you flipped from hall to hall.

The objective of all this chaos was to break down the two-dimensional thinking of a gravity-well-born human. The Phoenix had no up nor down, only the arbitrary geography of room numbers, coordinates, and classroom seating charts.

Of course, in the career of a naval officer, gravity was one of the mildest crises of subjectivity to overcome. For most cadets, the Time Thief, who stole your friends and family, was far more devastating than a wall turned overnight into a floor. But for Hobbes, the loss of an absolute down had always remained the greatest perversion of space travel.

Despite her long career in arbitrary gravity, Hobbes maintained a healthy fear of falling.

So, as always, stepping into the captain's observation blister brought on the old vertigo. It was like walking the plank, Hobbes supposed. But a plank was at least visible. She knew not to look down at her boots as they passed from the hypercarbon floor of the airlock onto the transparent surface of the blister. Instead, Hobbes kept her eyes focused on Captain Zai, finding security in his familiar form. Standing at a graceful parade rest with his back to her, he seemed suspended in space. The black wool of his uniform blended with the void, the piping of the garment, his head, and the trademark gray gloves hovering disembodied until Hobbes's eyes adjusted to the darkness. It was almost noon down at the palace, so the sun was at the Lynx's stern. The only light came from Legis XV, a full green bauble shining over Zai's left shoulder. At the 60,000-klick distance of geosynchronous orbit (a long day, that world), it was not the angry, bloated disk it had been during the rescue attempt. Now it was merely a baleful eye.

Hobbes looked at the planet with hatred. It had killed her captain.

"Executive officer reporting, sir."

"Report," Zai said, still facing the void. "In doing the postmortem--" The word froze in her mouth. She had not considered its original meaning in this context.

"Appropriate choice of terms, Executive Officer. Continue."

"In doing the PM, sir, we've discovered some anomalies."

"Anomalies?"

Hobbes looked at the useless hard encryption key in her hand. She had carefully prepared presentation files of the findings, but there were no hard-screens here in the observation blister. No provision for hi-res display, except for the spectacle of the universe itself. The images she intended to show would reveal nothing in low-res synesthesia. She would have to make do with words alone.

"We have determined that Private Ernesto was killed by friendly fire."

"The railgun bombardment?" Zai asked sadly, ready to add another measure of guilt to his failure.

"No, sir. The initiate's varigun."

His hands clenched. "Idiots," he said softly.

"A governor-override was triggered on the initiate's weapon, sir. It tried to warn him not to fire."

Zai shook his head, his voice sinking deeper into melancholy. "I imagine Barris didn't know what the alarm meant. We were fools to have issued him a weapon at all. Stupidity in the Political Apparatus is no anomaly, Hobbes."

Hobbes swallowed at the blunt talk, especially with two politicals still on board. Of course, the captain's blister, featureless and temporary, was the most secure station on the ship. And Zai was beyond punishment in any case. The death of the Child Empress--her brain was damaged beyond reanimation by the Rix blaster, Adept Trevim herself had confirmed--constituted an Error of Blood.

But this wasn't like the captain, this passivity. He had been quieter since his promotion, she thought, or perhaps since his captivity on Dhantu. As Zai turned around, Hobbes noticed the slight creases in the line of his jaw marking the physical reconstruction. What a star-crossed career, she thought. First that unfathomably horrible imprisonment, then an impossible hostage situation.

"That's not the only anomaly, sir," she said, speaking carefully now. "We've also taken a good look at Corporal Lao's helmet visuals."

"Good man, Corporal Lao," Zai muttered. The Vadan gender construction sounded odd to Hobbes's ear, as it always did. "But visuals? She was cut off by the field."

"Yes, sir. There were, however, a few windows of transmission. Long enough for armor diagnostics and even some visuals to upload."

Zai looked at her keenly, the lost, philosophical expression finally leaving his craggy features. Hobbes knew he was interested now.

The captain had to look at the visuals from Lao's helmet. The weapons and armor of orbital marines communicated continuously with the ship during action, uploading equipment status, the health of the marine, and pictures from the battle. The helmet visuals were low-grade monochrome at only nine frames per second, but they were wrapped three-sixty, and sometimes revealed more than the marines themselves had seen.

Zai simply must look at them before he put a blade of error to his belly. And it was up to Executive Officer Katherie Hobbes to make sure that he did.

"Sir, the entry wound on the Rix commando looks like a direct hit."

There. She'd said it. Hobbes felt a single drop of sweat mark a course down her back where standing at attention left a space between wool and skin. A careful analysis of this conversation, such as the Apparatus might one day make, could draw near the theory Hobbes and some of the other officers had begun tacitly to entertain.

"Executive Officer," her captain said, drawing himself to his full height, "are you by any chance trying to ... save me?"

Hobbes was ready for this.

"Sir, 'The study of the battle already fought is as essential as that of the battle to come.' Sir."

'"Engagement,'" Zai corrected, evidently preferring an earlier translation. But he seemed pleased, as he always was when Hobbes quoted the old war sage Anonymous 167. The captain even managed a smile, the first she'd seen on his face since the Empress's death. But then it turned bitter.

"Hobbes, in my hand is a blade of error, of sorts."

He opened one hand to reveal a small black rectangle. It was a single-purpose, programmable remote.

"Captain?"

"A little-known fact: For the elevated, the blade of error can take almost any form. It's a matter of choice. General Ricard Tash and his volcano, for example."

Hobbes frowned as she remembered the old tale. One of the first Errors, a lost battle during the Consolidation of Home. It had never occurred to her that Tash's suicide had involved some special dispensation. The prospect of scalding magma didn't seem so inviting as to require one.

"Sir? I'm not sure--"

"This remote is programmed to invoke a high-emergency battle-stations status in the Lynx, overriding every safety protocol," he explained, turning the remote over in his hand like a worry stick. "A standard command sequence, actually, useful for blockade patrols."

Hobbes bit her lip. What was she missing here?

"Of course, the captain's blister is not part of the battle-ready configuration of the Lynx, is it, Hobbes?"

A fresh wave of vertigo struck Katherie Hobbes, as surely as if the ship's gravity had flipped upside down without warning. She closed her eyes, struggling to control the wild gyrations of her balance, listing to herself the rote procedures of emergency battle stations: bulkheads sealed, weapons crash-charged, full extension of the energy-sink manifold, and blowing the atmosphere in any temporary, acceleration-sensitive constructions such as the blister she stood in now. There were safeties, of course, but they could be countermanded.

She felt as if she were falling, tumbling through the void with this all-but-dead man.

When she opened her eyes, he had taken a step closer, concern on his face.

"Sorry, Katherie," he said softly. "But you had to know. You'll be in command when it comes. No rescue attempts, understand? I don't want to wake up in an autodoc with my eyeballs burst out."

"Of course, sir," she managed, her voice sounded rough, as if a cold were coming on. She swallowed, a reflexive reponse to vertigo, and tried not to imagine the captain's face after decompression. That horrible transformation was something that couldn't happen. She would simply have to save him.

He stepped past her into the open door of the blister's airlock, leaving the black field of stars for solid metal. She followed him into the lock and rolled the reassuringly massive door into its sealed position.

"Now," Captain Zai said as the inner door opened, "I should like to see these visuals. 'No mark of war is too minute to reward careful study,' aye, Hobbes?"

"Aye, sir." Anonymous 167 again.

As she followed her captain to the command bridge, glad to have her feet on dense hypercarbon and hullalloy, Katherie Hobbes allowed herself to shelter an uncertain candle of hope.

COMPOUND MIND

Alexander flexed itself, feeling the ripple of its will promulgate through the infostructure of Legis XV.

The hostage crisis had for a time interrupted the normal flux of information across the planet. Market trading had been suspended, schools closed, the powers of the unwieldy Citizen's Assembly assumed by the Executive Diet. But now that the Imperials had retaken the palace, activity was beginning to rebuild in the world's arteries of data and interchange.

A few days of mourning would be observed soon, but for now the Empress's death was a closely guarded secret. Legis XV had survived its brief Rix occupation, and at the moment there was an outpouring of relief, a release of nervous energies throughout the intertwined systems of commerce, politics, and culture.

As for the existence of Alexander in their midst, the compound mind had not yet created panic. Once the population realized that their phones, data-books, and home automatics had not turned on them, the mind seemed more a curiosity than a threat--a ghost in the machine that had yet to prove itself unfriendly, whatever the propaganda of the grays.

And so the planet awoke.

Alexander felt this increasing activity as new and sudden vigor. The first day of consciousness had been exhilarating, but the compound mind now realized the true vitality of Legis XV. The planet's surge back into ordinary life--the shimmer of its billions, their commerce and politics--felt to the mind as if it were bursting anew from the shadowtime. The flowing data of secondary sight and audio, the clockwork of traffic management, water purification, weather control, even the preparations of the local military readying for another attack, were like the coursings of some morning stimulant through its body public.

Certainly, there were belated attempts by the Imperials to destroy Alexander. Data shunts and hunter programs were deployed, attempting to erase the influence of the Rix propagation, trying to tear down the self-conscious feedback that now illuminated the planet's infostructure. But the efforts were too late. What the Rix had long understood, and the benighted Imperials could not truly grasp, was that a compound mind is the natural state of affairs. As Rixia Henderson herself had theorized in the early days of Amazon, all systems of sufficient complexity tend toward self-organization, self-replication, and finally self-consciousness. All of biological and technological history was, for the Rix, a reflection of this essential law, as inescapable as entropy. Rixia Henderson's philosophy superseded such notions as social progress, the invisible hand of the marketplace, and the zeitgeist--shallow vanities all. The narrative of history itself was nothing more than the working out of the one law: humanity is but the raw material of greater minds. So Alexander, once born, could not be destroyed--unless technological civilization on Legis XV were itself destroyed.

The compound mind breathed deep its existence, surveying the vast energies of its domain. At last, the Rix had come to the Risen Empire, bringing the light of consciousness.

The only sectors of Legis XV that remained dark to Alexander were the gray enclaves, the cities of the dead that dotted the planet. The walking corpses of the Risen Empire eschewed technology and consumerism, so the phone calls and purchases and traffic patterns that informed Alexander's consciousness were missing. There was an appalling absence of bustle and friction from the afterlives of the dead. The needs that underlay technology--to buy and sell, to communicate, to politic and argue--did not exist in the gray enclaves. The risen walked quiet and alone in their necropolis gardens, perfomed simple arts by hand, went on their winding and pointless pilgrimages among the Eighty Worlds, and gave their allegiance to the Emperor. But they had no struggles, nothing from which true AI could arise.

Alexander puzzled over this strangely divided culture. The living citizens of the Empire engaged in rampant capitalism in pursuit of exotic pleasures and prestige; the risen were ascetic and detached. The warm participated in a fiercely fragmented, multiparty democracy; the cold univocally worshiped the Emperor. The two societies--one chaotic and vital, the other a static monoculture--not only coexisted, but actually seemed to maintain a productive relationship. Perhaps they each provided a necessary facet of the body politic: change versus stability, conflict versus consensus. But the division was terribly rigid, formed as it was by the barrier of death itself.

The Rix Cult did not recognize hard boundaries, especially between animate and inanimate; Rixwomen (they had disposed of the unnecessary gender) moved freely along the continuum between organic and technological, picking and choosing from the strengths of each. Rix immortality avoided a specific moment of death, preferring the slow transformation of Uprade. And the Rix, of course, worshiped the compound mind, an admixture of human activities mediated by machines, the ultimate blending of flesh and metal, giving rise to Mind.

Alexander mused that this gulf of sensibilities was why Empire and Cult must be forever at war. The staid traditions of the grays were antithetical to compound minds' very existence; the risen stilted competition and activity, vitality and change. The dead had choked the progress of the Empire, and made it poorer ground for the Rix to sow the seeds of their gods.

The mind's thoughts turned to the data it had gleaned from the Child Empress's confidant, the strange device wound into the dead girl. The child was now permanently destroyed by some folly of her Imperial rescuers, but Alexander was still confused about her. The mind found it hard to fathom the confidant's purpose. That was a strange thing in itself. Alexander could reach into any machine, transaction, or message on the planet and grasp it completely, having full access to the world's data reservoirs, the soup of information out of which meaning was constructed. But this one device made no sense; no instruction manuals, schematics, or medical contraindications existed for it, anywhere. It had contained no mass-produced components, and stored its internal data in a unique format. The confidant was devoid of meaning, an itch of absent understanding.

As it plumbed the planetary libraries in vain, Alexander slowly began to realize that this confidant had been a secret. It was singular and strangely invisible. No one on Legis XV had ever patented or purchased anything like the device, discussed it on the newsfeeds, scribbled a picture of it on a work tablet, or even mentioned it in a diary entry.

It was, in short, a secret of global--perhaps Imperial--proportions.

Alexander felt a warm rush of interest, a scintillation of energy like the fluctuations of the planet's seven private currencies when the markets opened. It knew, if only from the millions of novels and plays and games that informed its sense of drama, that when governments kept secrets, they did so at their peril.

So Alexander began closer analysis of the scant data it had wrung from the confidant in those few moments it had assumed control. The machine had evidently been designed to monitor the Empress's body, a strange accessory for one of the immortal dead. Her health should have been perfect, forever. To Alexander, the confidant's recordings were noise, the data obviously encrypted with a one-time pad. The pad must exist somewhere on Legis, somewhere off the nets. The compound mind remembered its few seconds inside the confidant, before the device had destroyed itself to avoid capture. For a moment, Alexander had seen the world through the machine's eyes.

Starting from that slender thread, it began to reverse-engineer the device, attempting to scry its purpose.

Perhaps there was another hostage of sorts to take, here on Legis XV. Some new lever to use against the Risen Empire, sworn enemy of all things Rix.